Scott H Young

Today is the first day of the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s theme is focus.

Focus is a complement to productivity, the second month, which emphasized creating systems that capture, organize and plan your efforts. But this system-building has an obvious weakness: it doesn’t decide what needs to be done and dedicate the attention needed to do it.

This weakness became apparent in running the companion course to this project. While many of the students enjoyed the second month of the program, it was also the focus area that brought up the greatest difficulties for many students.

This surprised me. I had anticipated the effort required for daily exercise, the complexity of a dietary overhaul, or even the technical fussiness of money management to be harder units. In retrospect, the difficulty makes perfect sense: capturing and organizing to-do items skips over the difficult work of choosing which you’ll actually do (and which you’ll deliberately procrastinate on), but it doesn’t force you to do any of them.

Focus, then, was missing.

How Do You Focus?

Focus is a combination of a philosophy, a skill and key habits:

• As a philosophy, focus is about accepting finitude and being comfortable with leaving things undone. All choices to work on one project are implicit rejections of everything else. All decisions to stick to a book, an exercise plan, a career move or a relationship confront all the other alternatives. If you haven’t fully accepted this part of human nature, focus is impossible—you’ll constantly be chasing the other thing you could have done and fail to focus on anything.
• As a skill, focus is about resisting the impulse to switch. It’s about resisting the temptation to rethink your goal or project, to change your plans midway, to check your phone, email or news for a little break. People who are good at focusing are low in impulsiveness, which is partly a hardwired psychological trait and partly downstream of our attentional environment.
• As a habit, focus is upheld by routines that shape your attention environment and center your goals: daily reviews, deep work rituals, putting your phone in another room, going to a space without internet to work, booking time with yourself in your own calendar, and so on.

The multifaceted nature of this foundation has made it hard for me to decide which keystone habit ought to be central for this month. My initial guess was for daily deep work, but I’m now reluctant to make that the core pillar. This is partly because it treads on my other course co-taught with Cal Newport. But mostly, it’s because my experience with students in the second month of the Foundations course suggests that deciding seems to loom even larger than simply putting in extended time to do the work.

Thus, I’m going to experiment with a few habits this month before making my final recommendation for the class. ¹

My Plans for Improving Focus

I consider this month’s area one of my strongest foundations. Not because I’m immune to distraction or procrastination (I do plenty of both), nor because I work especially long hours or obsessively (I do at times, but on average I have a modest workweek), but simply because choosing projects to undertake, sticking with them and finishing them as planned is something I’ve felt comfortable with for decades.

As such, I don’t really anticipate major improvements to this area, and I’m not sure exactly what improvement would look like. If anything, I’ve always struggled more with the periphery—I have few problems getting central tasks done, but odd errands and low-priority minutia can sit on my to-do list for months. I always have to consider the possibility that my personality defect is too much focus—tunnel vision that forecloses spontaneity and improvisation.

However, I’m still eager to work on focus this month, both for the possibility of unexpected discoveries in revisiting the research, and also for trying out concrete habits to see which may be most useful for the students in the course.

As of right now, here are the tentative habits I’m going to play around with this month as I try to narrow down which provide maximum efficacy for the least amount of extra burden in ordinary life:

1. Daily reviews. This was a suggestion in the productivity-focused second month, but many people didn’t follow it. I suspect part of the reason is that many people’s original reviews were too elaborate—instead, a quick glance at the tasks and reshuffling the list may be better, if only to underscore which tasks are at the top (and which are not).
2. The “MIT” method. The Most Important Task method is to center your work on one key task at a time. You may not literally be able to work on it in every moment (interruptions intervene) but the idea of having only one task top-of-mind at any time can be a good focusing habit. When the task is done, create a new task.
3. “What Three Things” method. This is like the MIT method, but there are three tasks prioritized, instead of one. The idea here is to keep a very short list of priorities, across different timescales. This rewards a kind of focus, and is an encouragement to break down bigger projects into smaller tasks. Three things is few enough that the choice at any moment is relatively constrained, but it also affords more flexibility than only having one task, allowing you to adapt your work to your current energy levels or situation.

This list is tentative. It may be that some other habit or technique is more appropriate—especially given that I may be atypical in applying this advice—so I’m glad to hear what other people find that works for them.

Reading and Research

This is a topic I’ve already researched fairly heavily, so I expect this month to be largely re-reading. Deep Work, Indistractible, Focus, First Things First and Essentialism are good popular books, and I plan to re-read Kahneman’s Attention and Effort and revisit a few cognitive science monographs on attention.

The only major topic of scholarly research where I feel a major blindspot is ADHD research. I’m always a little hesitant to comment on clinical disorders owing to my outsider status. But given the sky-high rates of self-diagnosis, I think it’s a gap I ought to fill in my own knowledge, if only to be able to redirect people to more credible sources of research than the flotsam that drifts around online.

_ _ _

Jumping forward in time (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team time to prepare the course content), I can say that the keystone habit I ended up selecting for this month is the idea of picking a daily highlight–a technique I learned from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s book Make Time.